Below is an abridged version of a story produced by Kurtural and republished on Global Voices with the authors’ permission. It is part of the series “The landless don’t go to the supermarket,” which will be re-edited for Global Voices. As a younger man, Mariano Castro helped found the Paraguayan community of Yby Pytã. Today, he has a five-room house and a farm with chicken coops, pig pens, nine cows and a corn crib filled with six tons of corn he harvested by hand. He has dozens of fruit trees, a wood-burning cook stove, and a newly picked crop of giant orange pumpkins. He’s 55 years old, with calm, vulnerable eyes and a shy smile. With his wife, Élida Benítez, he has eight children and five grandchildren. He has lost one son to prison and another to murder. But there’s one thing Mariano Castro lacks: a title to the land he’s cultivated for so many years. One winter morning – a hot and sunny morning like so many others during Paraguay’s winters – Mariano Castro is out in the field, as he is so often before the sun rises. He was born in the city of Caacupé in 1962, one year before the formation of the Institute of Rural Welfare (IBR in its Spanish acronym) and the passage of Paraguay’s Agriculture Bill, two changes that have shaped the course of Castro’s life. When he was 2 or 3 years old, Castro’s father, Enrique, left their home in Caacupé searching for land to farm to support his children. He started near Caaguazú, one of the areas of Paraguay most impacted by the struggle for land reform, an idea that would swamp the whole region in turmoil in the 1970s. In Paraguay, the process of land reform was coopted by then-dictator Alfredo Stroessner to illegally dole out enormous tracts of land to his supporters and friends— about 8 million hectares in all, an area the size of Panama. These improperly allocated lands, called “tierras malhabidas” (ill-gotten lands) in Paraguay, are often the subject of disputes between settlers forming new communities and the land’s putative owners. In his own search for land, Castro’s father would go farther east before finally settling permanently in Curuguaty, a community in the department of Canindeyú on the border with Brazil. Then, decades later, Castro followed in his father’s footsteps: In the summer of 1996, when Castro was in his early 30s, he found his own land to occupy, located 150 miles from Paraguay’s capital, Asunción. In 2013, that settlement, which today is called Yby Pytã I, and four other rural neighborhoods joined together to form part of the municipality of Yby Pytã. Occupying territory has been the primary means for Paraguayan peasants to gain access to land. Three generations of the Mariano family obtained their property through occupation. Photo by Melanio Pepangi. Used with permission. The farmland in Yby Pytã had owners, but Castro says that those lands were unproductive estates–large parcels in disuse–and subject to legal expropriation. Furthermore, for him land belongs to the people who use it; to use it, you must first occupy it. Occupying territory has been the main way rural Paraguayans gain access to land. “There is no settlement or community in this country that did not begin as an occupation,” says Perla Álvarez, a member of the National Organization of Rural and Indigenous Women (Conamuri). Researcher Mirta Barreto, who has written several books about the problem of land distribution in Paraguay, agrees that most of the lands controlled by rural Paraguayans have been obtained through occupation. Measure, hoe, cut, clear. Plant, cultivate, harvest. Care for livestock. Repeat. This is how land is occupied, how settlements are established, how towns are formed. Mariano Castro knows, because he spent a year and a half doing it. For 18 months, he walked 20 miles from his family’s home in Curuguaty to Yby Pyta in a caravan of young men depleted from the exhausting work of hoeing, cutting, clearing, and still more hoeing, cutting and clearing. For Castro, land belongs to the person who works it, and to work the land, it must first be occupied. Photo by Melanio Pepangi. Used with permission. It was a long and difficult journey for Castro. “My kids would ask why I wasn’t home, why I abandoned them. I’d spent two weeks at a time at the settlement. Without transportation, and it being hard to walk so far on foot, sometimes I’d be away from home for a long time,” he says. But little by little the settlement was taking form: Each member of the group developed their own 25-acre parcels, as stipulated in Paraguay’s Agriculture Bill. Castro built a small house, with bamboo walls and roof of hand-hewn wooden boards.